We used to think that a quality Doctor Who game could never be made, since the budget required would never be spent on a game with such limited international appeal. But although the last few tie-ins have all been varying degrees of awful, you can now begin to see how a more successful game would work.The Eternity Clock is a 2D platformer, which at first probably sounds like a mistake. But The Doctor is never going to fight or shoot anyone, while conversely running down long corridors pursued by bad guys has been one of his stock-in-trades for decades. The witty script does make numerous references to him being out of shape and having to reopen the TARDIS’s gym, and yet the simple but competently designed platform-jumping work perfectly well.The plot is the usual throwaway nonsense but the dialogue is frequently amusing and the voiceover work by Matt Smith, and Alex Kingston as River Song, is very good. (Amy and Rory aren’t in the game, so we’re not sure where it’s meant to be set within the context of the series.) The bad guys involved are the Cybermen, Daleks, Silurians, and The Silence – all of whom pop up for various spurious reasons but are rendered with a good degree of love and care by British developer Supermassive Games.Although there is a co-operative two-player option, when playing on your own the game switches you between controlling The Doctor and River as the plot dictates. Their platform controls are the same but The Doctor has his sonic screwdriver, which can be aimed via the right stick and is used to perform various dues ex machina tasks (mostly opening doors) by playing a little waveform-matching mini-game.In fact almost everything you do that doesn’t involve running away from monsters or pushing crates comes down to mini-games, but they’re an especially miserable example of their breed. Although they’re often reskinned there’s only a very few and rotating discs to completing a circuit, rerouting power to turn on a set of lights, and a game of high tech dominoes does little to add to the Whovian atmosphere.Unlike The Doctor, River Song is armed with a gun and her hallucinogenic lipstick, which adds in some light stealth elements as she creeps after enemies in order to snog them by surprise. Most of her gun-toting involves only stunning enemies, but again the basic mechanics work perfectly well.The problems with The Eternity Clock are two-fold, the first being that there’s just not enough gameplay here to hang a full game on. It is only a download, but it’s a fairly expensive one and after the first two or three levels it becomes quickly obvious the game is going to repeat the same small collection of ideas for its entire length.The more peculiar issue is that it’s all so frustratingly difficult. For something that is presumably intended mostly for kids the game delights in punishing you right from the very beginning. Part of the problem is that enemies are often wandering around in the background and it’s rarely clear when exactly they can see you and if they’ll attack. But even once you learn that the game’s not pulling its punches the sparse checkpointing means having to repeat section again and again. God forbid if you want to stop playing the game and come back to it later as you’ll have to repeat everything in a level just to get to wherever you left off. We have no problem with difficult games, but this is testing your patience not your skill.There’s a particularly frustrating moment early on in your encounters with the Cybermen, where a vaguely described goal can only be achieved if you wait long tedious minutes for the tin-plated dullards to march up a set of stairs and smash through a couple of windows for you. And every time you fail you have to just stand there waiting once again.Given the amount of care and attention that’s gone into other areas of the game this is all baffling. There’s a difficulty setting for the puzzle mini-games but all this seems to do is give you longer to solve them. You can use the co-op mode to compensate for the frequent mistakes made by the computer-controlled character, but given the difficultly level this is likely only to end in argument and recrimination.And it is a shame because the graphics are generally very good, not least because most of the time they recreate the sort of cheap-looking sets used by the show rather than a more ambitious virtual backdrop. Running through the Bank Of England’s vaults or through River’s Stormcage prison looks exactly like the basement of some nondescript BBC building and that actually adds to the charm.As a game though, rather than a piece of Doctor Who merchandising, this is an almost complete failure. The 2D platforming approach could’ve worked though, especially if it was combined with the graphic adventure style character interaction from the downloadable PC games.But they were as sloppily designed and vacuous as this and in the end both games suffer from the problem of all tie-ins: it doesn’t matter how authentic they might be to the source material, if they’re not a good game then no one is going to enjoy them – not even the fans.In Short:Another failed Doctor Who tie-in, but one that’s especially disappointing because of how much it gets right in terms of the dialogue and visuals.Pros:A great script, filled with jokes and fan-pleasing references. Good voiceovers too and better graphics than you’d expect.Cons:Needlessly difficult from the start, with frustrating artificial intelligence and a lack of sensible checkpointing. Simplistic platforming and tedious mini-games.Score:3/10Formats: PlayStation 3 (reviewed), PS Vita and PCPrice: £13.99Publisher: BBC WorldwideDeveloper: Supermassive GamesRelease Date: 23rd May 2012 (13/6 on PSV, TBC on PC)Age Rating: 12Video:Check out the Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock trailer